Unlike most 27-year-old men, Jeff Henke has never owned a videogame console. So after eight years of conscientious swotting to qualify as a doctor it came as somewhat of a shock to Jeff to learn that his homework now includes an hour a night on the Nintendo Wii. "This isn't exactly what I pictured of when I thought of medical school," he says. "But I'm not complaining."

Henke is a second-year resident surgeon at the Banner Good Samaritan Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, and for the past year he has been a willing guinea pig in a study measuring the effects on surgeon proficiency from regular gameplay on Nintendo's popular console. And the results are impressive.

"The surgeons develop an increased efficiency, less errors, more fluid movement - basically they're just better," says Dr Mark Smith, director of the hospital's Simulation Education and Training (SimET) Center. To be precise, the doctors who regularly played on the Wii scored 48% higher on tool control and performance than those who didn't.

Not all fun and games

There have been numerous studies carried out across the globe that all come to the same conclusion: surgeons who play videogames have better hand-to-eye coordination and dexterity. So does this study in Phoenix merely reiterate that point, or is there something that sets the Wii apart from the crowd?

"We can always tell the surgeons who are gamers, because they're naturally better," says Smith. (He's also keen to point out that within a very short time period, non-gamers are on a par.) "But what we're finding with the Wii is that the surgeons that use it regularly are achieving results that far outstrip those who have just gamed before. And that's because the Wii is very different."

The difference being down to the "Wiimote", the motion-sensitive controller that transforms real-life movements into movements on the screen. Just over a year ago, Smith's partner at the SimET Center, bioinformatics expert Dr Kanav Kahol, first started pondering the Wii's potential.

"The whole point about surgery is to execute small, finely controlled movements with your hands," says Kahol. "Then we saw people using the Wii and noticed the precision of some movements looked very similar."

Kahol and Smith rounded up 16 surgical residents, split them into two groups and started one of the groups on a strict diet of videogaming, the other being a control group. Some games proved to be of more benefit than others. "You don't gain a lot from swinging an imaginary tennis racket," says Kahol.

It soon became apparent that the game benefiting the lab rats most was Marble Mania (called Kororinpa in the UK) - a game that requires slight hand movements to guide a marble through a maze. Hand movements were tracked using a Cyberglove covered in sensors and the readouts showed the manoeuvres had a 90% correlation to those of a surgeon performing a laparoscopic surgery.

"Minimally invasive laparoscopic surgery is a very fine art," says Smith. "A laparoscope is inserted into the abdomen through small incisions. There's a camera in the probe and surgeons work off monitors. Very small instruments are used and they are controlled by the smallest of hand movements."

Put like that, the similarities are not too hard to see. Additional training is obviously required to get doctors accustomed to working from a screen and using the laparoscopic instruments. Increasingly, this training is done using virtual reality machines whose value can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, only affordable to wealthier hospitals. Whereas a Wii and a copy of Kororinpa can be bought for around £200 - even less in the US.

Wii will cut you

Now the hospital has created stations where the controllers have been extended to make them feel more like probes to the user, and doctors warm up on them before going into surgery.

And the hospital is developing its own basic games - such as picking up rings and putting them on pegs - but the movements are very sensitive. And in the next two years the team at the SimET Center hopes they will be ready for mass production. In the meantime, many in the medical world are excited about the implications of Smith and Kahol's findings.

"Of course there are the obvious advantages: better surgeons," says Susanna Barascu, a Romanian senior surgeon who has spent most of her career working in developing-world countries, with the past 10 years in Africa.

She says: "During minimally invasive surgeries there is reduced exposure of vital organs, meaning a reduced risk of infection. There is also reduced blood loss, meaning reduced need for transfusions. And patients can get out of hospital and back home sooner.

"In the countries I work in, where risk of infection is high and supply of blood and beds is short, any cheap development that can lead to fewer open procedures is incredibly exciting." And for those who are just embarking on their careers the excitement lies in the direction the profession is heading.

"The future of surgery is utilising remote onscreen technology," says Henke. "But what makes it exciting are minds like Dr Kahol and Smith's, who look at everyday inexpensive technologies and think, 'How could I use that?' "

With such conviction and a first-hand benefactor of such thinking, one could be forgiven for thinking that Henke musts pend his evenings at home in front of his Wii honing his skills. Doesn't he?

"Well, I know I should really buy one for home ... but I still keep holding out hope that the hospital might give me one for 'research'."